Severance (6 page)

Stein snorted. Ellen leaned back, staring up at the far side
of the well hanging overhead. “So, what’s your beef, anyways?” she finally
asked.

Stein tilted her head. “No beef.”

“You’re acting beefy. I can see the beef on your face.”

Stein smiled but offered no reply.

After a few seconds of waiting, Ellen finally asked, “So,
how’s what’s–his–face? Does he still want to make you incredibly happy?”

Stein knew it was coming but groaned anyways. “I don’t want
to talk about it.” A pause, before she ignored her own protest, saying, “And I
didn’t think you approved of Sergei.”

“Based on his clothes, yeah, I think he’s a son of a bitch,”
Ellen agreed. Most of Stein’s friends had well–founded reasons for disliking
the ship’s security department. Stein held no great love for them either, but
she and they had managed to stay out of each other’s hair for quite some time. “But,
if he likes you, that makes him a rare breed, an improbable genetic mutation, a
gift not to be turned away casually. And besides, if you’re willing to date a
guy in uniform, he must be well armed,” Ellen concluded, patting her crotch. Stein
grinned. Ellen cackled.

Across the lawn, Griese appeared through the crowd, spotted
the pair, and crossed over to meet them. Griese was about the same height as
Ellen, and possessing a similar haircut and fashion sense, it was sometimes
difficult to tell the pair apart from a distance. Jokes about narcissism had
dogged the pair their whole married lives.

“My old lady hassling you again?” Griese asked after sitting
down.

“Yes, but she also appears to be employing some sort of
outsourcing agency now, judging by the young man she brought by earlier.”

“Oh, yeah?” Griese asked, nodding. He turned to Ellen. “You
get a drink out of him?”

She held her glass up like a trophy.

“Atta girl.”

Stein had been introduced to the pair a dozen years earlier
by Bruce, and had slotted them in as numbers two and three on the slowly
growing list of people she didn’t hate. Where some people on board the Argos
itched at the boredom of ship life, inventing disgusting hobbies to keep
themselves busy, both Ellen and Griese had been born with some specific
combination of genes that made extended bouts of directionless leisure time
perfectly tolerable to them. ‘French genes,’ Ellen had suggested. Griese, with
his five–week–a–year commitment to the dramatic arts, was by far the more
industrious of the pair. The rest of the time, they drank and told jokes to
each other.

Stein spotted the final member of their foursome, making his
way across the patio, the crowds parting around him like the bow wave of a
ship. “Where the hell have you been?” she asked as he drew within talking
distance.

Bruce stopped, eyes widening. “Work, jerk. A whole bunch of
membranes clammed up around the hospital this afternoon, and we were short
staffed.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“Didn’t need you. Also, you work too much anyways. I’ll take
any chance I can get to keep you out of the office. Also, you smell like piss.”

Stein sniffed the air. “How about that.” Something clicked. “What
do you mean, short staffed?”

“Clay dropped a vent cover on his foot. It was awesome; his
toe looked like a fucking eggplant. And Gabelman fucked off somewhere. No one’s
seen him since this morning, and he wasn’t answering any calls.”

Stein frowned. For all the complaints she had with Curts, he
did fairly well at keeping the complete morons out of the maintenance team.
Stein herself had a pretty good handle on which of her team members were
responsible or not, and although Gabelman was new, he hadn’t given her the
impression he would just wander off like that. She groaned, knowing she would
have to have a talk with him. “Well, glad you finally made it,” she said,
pushing herself off the grass. “Let’s get a drink.”

“Yes, let’s,” Bruce replied. “I seem to have finished this
one on the walk here from the bar.”

§

“So, what I’m hearing is that at least some of that piss
smell was your own,” Bruce surmised, hunched over his beer.

Stein tipped her chair back, leaning against the wood–like
wall behind her. The two sat at one of the tables in the back of the Prairie.
On the wall above her, a horned replica of an animal’s head loomed over their
conversation. Griese had wheeled Ellen home for the evening, leaving the pair
alone to recount the events of the previous night’s expedition. Stein had
retold the story from her point of view, explaining everything up through the
blinding blue light. She omitted the part about Vlad though, not knowing where
to begin with it.

“So, I’m thinking this M. Melson has something in there that
he wanted to keep hidden,” she said.

Bruce spun his glass in his hands. “And has — or had — a
booby trap installed to do just that. Yeah, could be.”

“That’s what I was thinking. It sounds like some kind of
blinder, right?”

Stein had managed to corner Ellen earlier to ask her what
blinder grenades looked like. “Fucking blinding, innit?” was the slurred
response. “A pure faschist ray of bullshit photons that violatsh your fucking shkull
through the ocular cavity,” Ellen had added. “Why?” Stein had answered her by
ordering her another beer, which had gone over well.

Stein watched over Bruce’s shoulder as a group of revelers
filled the dance floor. A complicated, synchronized dance started up, people
lurching and weaving in unison while the sound system blared a song about a
truck. “I guess you could jury–rig one up to be a booby trap,” Bruce finally
said. “Any idea what set it off? You said you were swinging your huge ass
around like a wrecking ball?”

“I don’t think I phrased it like that, but yes, I think I
bumped into something. I can’t recall seeing anything there that looked the
slightest bit interesting, but a lot of it was wrapped up, or in boxes.”

“Didn’t even have to be something visible. Your massive and
terrifying hindquarters might have jostled a secret compartment behind the
shelves or something.”

“Indeed. I could have disturbed M. Melson’s secret
collection of…” Stein paused, searching.

“Body grooming products.”

“Locks of hair.”

“Holograms of shirtless nuns boxing.”

Bruce leaned back, contemplative. “Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.”

Stein saw the next bit coming. “You want to go back.”

Bruce waggled his head back and forth. “Maybe. Not tonight.
I’m just curious, is all. Might do a bit of research on who exactly this M.
Melson is.”

“Caution? Research? Reading and quiet contemplation? Bruce,
what have you been drinking?”

“Professional–level recklessness requires a surprising
amount of planning and forethought,” he said, wagging his finger at her. “Hours
of work for every pratfall. I just make it look easy.”

§

A few hours later Bruce lurched over to the desk in the
corner of his apartment, and sat down heavily. “Who you at, M. Melson?” he
asked the desk. Not receiving a reply, he smacked a meaty paw on the display,
beginning his investigation.

The name M. Melson itself was unusual. Bruce had never seen
a property record registered using an initial before. After pounding his fists
on the desk display for awhile, then slightly softer with his slightly smaller
fingers, he was able to bring up the census database, where he found out the
second unusual thing about the name: it didn’t exist. Thanks to the ancient
custom still practiced on the Argos of a child taking one of their parents’
names, there was a strict upper limit of surnames on board. And Melson wasn’t
one of them.

Bruce got up from his chair and looped his way across the
living room to the liquor cabinet, where he picked out a bottle of Berry.
Unscrewing it with his teeth, he returned to the desk and sat down. The
property transfer process was pretty straightforward: two parties came to an
agreement, transferred whatever funds or sexual favors they had agreed on, co–signed
an electronic form, and sent it all to the central records department. The signatures
were the tricky bit; the transaction system had a variety of biometric and anti–coercion
scanners in place that made those hard to forge. Which meant that whoever this
M. Melson was, he had somehow fooled the signature system to accept his false
identity. Or, that there actually was an M. Melson who later deleted himself
from the census. Neither of these possibilities seemed very likely, but they
did both seem interesting.

Curious, he checked the property transfer database itself,
something he had access to thanks to a highly successful bit of blackmail he
had once pulled off. The studio had apparently been sold to Maurice Melson by a
Charlotte Redelso nine years earlier. No indication why the name was truncated
in the public listings, but at least he had another clue to work with. Further
back into the studio’s history, it had been in the Redelso family for sixty
years.

He turned his attention back to M–for–Maurice Melson.
Despite the close confines of the Argos, its citizens still had a reasonable
expectation of privacy with regard to their personal records. The security
forces could do detailed traces, background checks, and off–duty stalking, but
Bruce was limited to searches of publicly visible news sites and records. Which
turned up absolutely nothing when queried for “Maurice Melson.” “Melson”
returned substantially more results, but nothing from the past thirty years; it
was a dead name. With breeding sharply limited by government edict, the number
of named descendants was similarly restricted, and thanks to disease and
accidental deaths, a few family names inevitably died off. A bit more searching
showed that the last living Melson was a Greg Melson, who died in a well–wall
climbing accident thirty years earlier. News feeds at the time all made note of
the fact that Greg had no children, and that — notwithstanding the fact that ‘we
were all cousins’ — the Melson family’s journey on board the Argos had come to
a close.

So where did Maurice come from? And how did he go from
not being a person to being a person who bought properties and booby–trapped
them?
Bruce’s bladder interrupted his investigation, and after tending to
it, he decided he wasn’t likely to make further progress on the problem until
he rampaged through the studio itself. And now the hour was too late, and the
drink too heavy in him, for proper rampaging. But he had other things to do
anyway. He checked the time.
Probably safe now.

On his terminal, he opened the control panel to remotely
monitor a maintenance robot. Over the past week he had slowly maneuvered it across
the ship until it reached the roof of Curts’ garden well apartment. It was
painstaking, tedious work of the sort he would normally shun were it not in
support of such a good cause. Curts, his boss, was an
enormous
wiener,
and fully worth the time and effort Bruce dedicated to aggravating him.

He maneuvered the robot out of its hiding spot and over the
edge of the building to a perch directly above Curts’ bedroom window. When it
pressed its manipulator against the windowpane, Bruce triggered a subroutine that
rapidly vibrated it against the windowpane, creating a makeshift but
surprisingly effective speaker playing a loop of a low, almost sub–vocal voice,
slowly whispering to Curts as he slept,
“Curts. Currrrrrrts. I am Curts. I
love Curts. I love you. I love me. Love. Love. LOOOOOVE. Now peeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Peeeeeeeeeeeeee. PEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

Satisfied, Bruce activated a second subroutine that instructed
the robot to return to its hiding spot if it heard any disturbance from within
the room. He shut off his terminal and left the robot to its work. If
everything went according to plan, Curts would wake up feeling ashamed and
damp, and need a couple of personal days to straighten himself out. Rolling
into bed himself, Bruce conceded there was at least some possibility Curts
would react by stepping off a light tower instead. “I’d feel bad if that
happened,” Bruce said aloud, turning off the lights. “Though I’d probably feel
worse if I knew that I hadn’t tried.”

§

Stein opened the double–wide doors and stepped through into
the reactor room. “And this is the bow auxiliary power room,” she announced to
the group of kids trailing behind her. A couple of technicians looked up at the
crowd of tiny wriggling projectiles that two beleaguered teachers struggled to
ride herd on.

The room was large for this part of the ship, the curvature
of the floor readily visible. Only a few decks away from the core, the pseudo
gravity was about a tenth of normal. The room was dominated by the reactor, or
more precisely, the reactor shielding, a large cylinder oriented parallel to
the ship’s axis, half embedded in the floor. On the far side of the space, a
figure in a naval uniform jumped up and landed on top of the engine shielding
with practiced grace. Stein nodded to Max, the bow auxiliary engineer.

“This is what fires the rockets?” one of the kids asked.

“Not quite,” Max replied with practiced patience. Aside from
having to explain that to every school group that went through here, Max was
used to fielding this question from grown–ups as well. Most of the adults on
board the Argos didn’t know where their heat and electricity came from. “This
engine powers the electrical and heating systems for the bulk of the ship. The
propulsion engine is in the aft.” He gestured to the far end of the room. “But
otherwise, the reactors are basically identical. Does anyone here know what
antimatter is?” Max launched into his spiel, leading the group deeper into the
room.

Stein held back at the door, eager for the break. Not for
the first time, she wondered about the intent of these field trips. The kids
didn’t want to see any of this, far preferring the simple joys of mucking
around in low–gravity. The cooling plant, network relay, and heat recyclers had
similarly held little interest for them. She didn’t blame them — most of this
stuff wasn’t that exciting, and she didn’t recall enjoying it that much when
she was a child. But the teachers felt it important, and every few months or so
another group of children would crawl all over the vital organs of the ship and
grow immediately bored of them.